When We Were Orphans: A Novel
by Kazuo Ishiguro
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Book Reviews of When We Were Orphans: A Novel
Book Review: As Good As Remains of the Day
Summary: 5 Stars
There seems to be quite a few reviewers who prefer Remains of the Day over When We Were Orphans. I don't quite understand this preference since there are obvious parallels between the two books. For example: 1. Both books take place before, during and after WWII.
2. Both books have a main character/narrator who is English.
3. Both books have a main character/narrator who is delusional. (Remains's Stevens is delusional of his Master's (Darlington's) dealings with the Nazis. Orphans's Banks is delusional of his parents still being held captive in the same house for 30 years.)
4. Both books have a main character/narrator who is incapable of accepting love from a woman. (Remain's Stevens turns down Miss Kenton's love for him. Orphan's Banks similarly turns down Sarah's love for him. He deserts her at the gramaphone store in Shanghai, doesn't he?)
5. Both books have a supporting character who unintentionally betrays the main character's/narrator's trust. (Remain's Darlington unintentionally betrayed Stevens with his dealings with the Nazis. Orphan's Uncle Philip betrayed Banks with his dealings with the Communists.)
I could go on and on with the similarities, but I'll stop here. My point for bringing all this up is if you the reader can accept the main character being delusional, unaccepting of love from a woman, etc. in one book--why do you have a problem with it in another book?
One reviewer found the Banks character detestable. I would like to ask that reviewer, didn't she find the Stevens character just as detestable? Wasn't he as self-centered, heartless, and shallow as the Banks character? But then everyone is raving about Remains of the Day and finding all kinds of problems with When We Were Orphans.
Now I would like to get to the climax in both books. In Remains of the Day, Stevens finally gets together with Miss Kenton after all these years only to discover that she is unwilling to move back to Darlington Hall. Essentially she rejects him. In When We Were Orphans, Banks finally gets together with his mother after all these years only to discover that she barely remembers him. Essentially she rejects him too. If you the reader had a problem with the climax in Orphans, why didn't you have a problem with the climax in Remains? Aren't they essentially the same?
As you can see from my review, I liked Orphans and Remains equally. Both were well written with interesting characters in a good storyline. Sure there were some things that bothered me about Banks just as there were some things that bothered me about Stevens--but why do we as readers have to like every character that we read? Life is interesting when there are different types of people. Likewise fiction is interesting when there are different types of people--likeable and unlikeable. I can read off a bunch of characters who I have found unlikeable. Read just about any Dostoyevski novel--with the exception of The Idiot--and you will find a main character who is in one way or another detestable. Raskonikov of Crime and Punishment comes to mind.
For those of you who have not read When We Were Orphans, read it with an open mind and you may be surprised to find that you like it. Ishiguro DOES NOT write like your typical bestselling novelist--he is in a league of his own. He challenges your ability and imagination as a reader.
One last note--when Banks came across Akira as a soldier...was that really Akira? You are being challenged.
Book Review: Very disappointing effort by immensely talented writer
Summary: 2 Stars
This story of a deluded and emotionally-stunted individual in search of his lost parents and his vanished childhood left me frustrated and disappointed.
Ishiguro is an amazing writer but in this work his talent lets him down. He has the rare ability of capturing an entire character through the narrative voice he creates for him. His writing is always to clear and evocative. He displays this talent again in this book, but it is not enough to save it.
As the book begins, we meet Christopher Banks growing up in the International Settlement in Shanghai with a father working for a British company and a mother passionately opposed to the opium trade. I should note here that Ishiguro's depiction of pre-war Shanghai I found not particularly evocative as compared say to J.G. Ballard's "Empire of the Sun."
Christopher makes friends with a young Japanese boy his own age, Akira. (WARNING, SPOILER AHEAD). Later, at the denoument of the book, they meet again in a scene that is particularly unsatisfying. I'm not sure if Akira was supposed to be a symbolic character. if so, I was unable to grasp his symbolic significance and as a flesh-and-blood character he falls short.
Christopher's father disappears and is suspected to have been kidnapped. A little later, his mother also vanishes. Christopher, then about 10, is shipped to boarding school in England.
As he recounts his schooldays, we become aware that Christopher is an unreliable narrator. He obviously thinks he fits in as a perfect little Englishman. We become aware that he obviously stands out. When people slight him, he's oblivious or pretends to be oblivious.
Christopher grows up to become a "detective" in the Sherlock Holmes mode and imagines himself a fighter in the frontline against evil. His chosen profession, invoked in a deliberately old-fashioned and unrealistic manner (he seems to spend his time on his stomach peering through a magnifying glass) is evidently an attempt to compensate for the unsolved mystery of his parents' disappearance.
Christopher also meets Sarah Hemmings, a fellow-orphan and similarly unmoored character. The two seem attracted to one another but also both too emotionally stunted to connect.
Sarah's role in the story is strange. She doesn't seem to fit in, except as an example of Christopher's inability to find a proper place in the world.
Finally, Christopher travels back to Shanghai to solve the mystery of his parents' disappearance. The city of engulfed in fighting as the Japanese threaten to take over. Christopher seems to believe that his success in clearing up his own mystery would be a decisive blow against "evil" that could somehow stave off the coming World War. In this part of the book, the plot becomes entirely unmoored from reality.
I am an admirer of this author but I felt reading this book that he was trying too hard to duplicate his previous success. As a protagonist, Christopher is all too similar to Stevens from "The Remains of the Day." But this book lacks the emotional resonance of the earlier effort, which looks back ruefully on a life, a way of life and an entire empire.
Ishiguro cannot keep returning to this well. He needs to find a new wellspring of inspiration. "When We Were Orphans" shows too clearly that the old well has run dry.
Book Review: We are NOT obliged to believe everything the narrator says
Summary: 4 Stars
Readers who made a merit of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day would well up such high anticipation of When We Were Orphans and only to find the book did not achieve the same caliber of the precedent. While I have no doubt that When We Were Orphans is a fine piece of literature, I feel an onus to do its justice in spite of all the (negative) bashing on the book.However jumbled or confusing the book might have appeared (to many people), the plot is very simple. Christopher Banks, the protagonist and narrator, was born and raised in Shanghai, China, in the 1920s when Europeans swarmed into the city for trades and business. Banks' mother was at the time involved in an underground organization that thwarted the imports of opium in the country, a practice that was rife and lucrative. As his parents mysteriously disappeared, one by one, Banks was taken back to England to be under the care of his aunt. Banks eventually became a renowned London detective and returned to Shanghai in hope of resolving the mystery of his parents' disappearance.
Far as the unreliable narrator tactics goes, as readers, we are not obliged to believe everything that Banks says (so why the pet peeves?). Ishiguro does not seem to make clear which of the leads readers should hold on to and deem as the truth. The truth is, our ability of recollections is not always as accurate as we think (or we want). The inevitable consequence of such shortcoming only produces in mind mishmash or a collage of memory fragments. Imagine all these combined with the naivete of a 9-year-old, how reliable can the narration be? Even though detective Banks had become increasingly preoccupied with his memories (more or less a preoccupation encouraged by the discovery of his childhood memories), what really happened to his parents remained a blur. From time to time Banks "was struck anew by how hazy so much of the memories have grown" (70) as he had trouble recalling something that happened 2 or 3 years ago. So while we might have to guess what the truth is, Ishiguro does subtly hint not to trust everything we read.
Ishiguro's prose is seamless, elegant and dazzling. He book manifests authenticity of the setting, especially Shanghai, in that given time period, where the so-called elite of Shanghai (made up of Chinese businessmen and politicians in the high echelon of society and foreign entrepreneurs) treated with such contempt the suffering of the average Chinese civilians. The characters are etched, especially the reminiscences of the friendship between Akira and Banks, and the anecdotes when little Banks jocosely ordered his mother to get off the swing at once in fear of breaking it.
A fine piece of literature is never without flaw. The book take quite a sharp turns and rushes to an end that shocks not only the readers but the protagonist as well. I will not give that away to spoil the reading experience but to me honestly it is somewhat annoying (and lame). All I can say is the resolution of the case brings about irreparable damage in Banks' life and affirms his traumatic childhood. The fun part is being tricked at the end. An intriguing story. Page-turner. 4.2 stars.
Book Review: Unremarkable writing, daffy plot, weak recycled protagonist
Summary: 2 Stars
Another disappointment from Kazuo Ishiguro, and the fact that it was nominated for the Booker Prize shows how imbecilic literary fiction prizes are these days.
There were many annoying things within this novel, and chief among which is the protagonist Christopher is a passive idiot. Of course, Stevens from Remains of the Day was a passive idiot too, but Stevens was SUPPOSED be an idiot whereas Christopher is supposed to be a celebrated detective. This guy can't solve some kid stealing lunch money much less the most celebrated cases in early 20th-century England! I started getting mad--I always do when I read crap novels--when Christopher is searching for the house his parents supposedly were jailed in. Why he assumes his parents are there is beyond me--it's explained, but it's a VERY weak explanation--and why he would assume they would still be there despite a passage of 20-odd years and the fact that it's in the middle of a war zone is jaw-droppingly idiotic. Along the way, in the middle of the war while searching for his parents, Christopher just happens to be come across his great childhood friend Akira. Think about this for a second. Shanghai has, what, 10 million people, and Christopher, after yearning to see his childhood friend for so long, just happens to come across this guy on the street. Give me the break!!! Contrivance works sometimes--notice the reemergence of the protagonist's childhood enemy in The Kite Runner--but you'd better have a decent plot to hide such contrivance. This novel, sadly, doesn't have a decent plot. In fact, I'm not even sure what the hell Christopher was doing in Shanghai as a detective. What crime was he trying to solve? It's explained very anemically, and the only investigation he does is finding some drunk cop from the old days. He does no interviews, collects no evidence, nothing. And Ishiguro describes him as if he were Holmes or something!
Bottom line: a weak effort on Ishiguro's part. He seems to be repeating himself. Jennifer, Christopher's adopted daughter, has suicidal tendencies much like the Japanese woman's daughter in A Pale View of the Hills. Never mind that Jennifer, from her childhood, seems a very vivacious girl with a happy disposition. No, Ishiguro had to make it sad, and what's sadder than a young woman who wants to kill herself?
Worst, all his recent male characters seem to be variations of Stevens, the repressed, passive butler in Remains of the Day. Stevens worked because the story NEEDED a Stevens. This story needed a lot more dynamic a protagonist.
And the prose is the perfectly understated, narcoleptic prose of his other novels--even though this is ostensibly a detective story set in a major war. Imagine Lars von Trier directing Terminator, and you'd see why such prose is so totally out of place in writing such a story.
Bottom line: Ishiguro is starting to look like a guy with a one-trick pony--and he's seriously flogging it for all it's worth.
Book Review: Masterpiece of aberrant reality
Summary: 5 Stars
A brief look at the available reviews shows that middle opinions are rare. You either have the taste for Ishiguro's works after "The Remains of The Day" or you don't. It seems that many reviewers somehow missed Ishiguro's "The Unconsoled" (1997) which marked the departure from his impeccably realistic early works to the thrill of unexpected ground loss when reality suddenly starts melting. I greatly admire the author's craft in creating the sense of hugely aberrant reality from a set of completely innocently looking steps. The story starts slowly and picks up the tempo but very gradually. The narrative matter is very smooth, and each next episode is logically consistent with the previous one. Bothersome seeds are noticeable however here and there, usually in the overt obsessiveness of the main character with certain minor details. It feels as if the reader is forced to look at the world through his eyes and accept certain bents. Next time the reader notices a couple of hundred pages later, the entire world around the main hero is distorted. Even physical space and time are not the same. Effects worthy of science fiction remain completely unexplainable in "The Unconsoled", where a non-trivial highway drive is needed to get to the next room in the same hotel. In "When We Were Orphans" it also sometimes takes a very long time to get to a nearby point but this is because the path goes through an urban battleground, so the laws of nature are formally preserved, yet the eery feeling of irreality lingers on. By the end of the story the stream of events gets truly hectic and you can only guess whether there will be a resolution, which can never be taken for granted with Ishiguro. In comparison with static and observant earlier works, here the author makes the hero go through a bit of action.
Overall "When We Were Orphans" is more mature and less romantic work than "The Unconsoled" (and very different and not directly comaparable to "The Remains of The Day"). It is very intriguing whether Ishiguro will be able to make another step in the same direction (it does not feel that the theme of a confusued man in confusing world is exhausted) or will come up with something altogether different. I would not attach too much importance to the merits of the plot (or lack thereof) or to the message of moral responsibility in judging the novel. It is first and foremost a beautiful construct, made of everyday words and crisp sentences, yet almost as powerful in its abstraction as classical instrumental music.